The present invention is directed toward a shoe box and, more particularly, toward a shoe box which can safely and temporarily hold the shoes of a hotel guest on the outside of a hotel room door so that the shoes can be picked up, shined and returned and which does not require that the hotel guest have a key to open the box.
Many better hotels in the United States and elsewhere provide valet service to their guests for having suits or other articles of clothing cleaned and/or pressed. In order to advise the hotel that a guest wishes to utilize such a service, the guest is often requested to place the clothes in a specially provided bag and to place the same outside of his door. Obviously, such a procedure can often result in theft of such clothing.
In order to prevent such theft, older hotels provided guest room doors which included an interior chamber which was accessible from either the interior of the room or the hallway. When a guest wished to have a suit pressed, for example, he would unlock and open the interior chamber cover and place the suit therein. A sign or other type of visual signaling device notified personnel that there was something within the chamber. The hotel personnel could then unlock the outer chamber cover and remove the suit. While such arrangements were workable, they are seldom utilized in modern hotels because of the considerable cost involved in constructing doors with the required interior chambers.
To the best of Applicant's knowledge, no one has ever attempted to develop an arrangement such as a housing or the like which can be attached to an existing door for valet cleaning services in a hotel. Furthermore, to the best of Applicant's knowledge, hotel valet services have never offered shoe shining service. This is probably due to the difficulty in arranging for the pick up and delivery of shoes without significantly inconveniencing a hotel guest.
Locked receptacles for leaving items outside of a door have been proposed in the past although not specifically for leaving shoes to be shined. Examples of such prior art proposals are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,934,434 and 2,273,580.
The former patent utilizes a combination lock which must be used by both the person placing the article inside the housing and the person desiring to remove the article therefrom. Thus, if such a device were utilized in a hotel, each guest would have to be given the combination to the lock which would create a later security problem. The second mentioned patent utilizes a key rather than a combination lock and includes a housing having an opening at one end thereof through which a person can insert an article into the housing without unlocking the same. The particular construction of the receptacle shown in this patent, however, makes the same totally unusable for shoes.